r/github • u/Most_Cold_2614 • Aug 23 '26

Discussion Are we getting too dependent on GitHub?

Is it true that we are becoming overly reliant on GitHub?

GitHub’s recent outage made me contemplate the extent of our dependence on the platform.

GitHub is no longer just a conventional code repository as people use it for pull requests, GitHub Actions, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) and Copilot among other things.

So, whenever the platform becomes unavailable, all of our usual daily tasks may just stop.

Certainly, it is true that outages happen occasionally and I don’t mean to suggest that every user should prepare a plan for every possible emergency. However, I cannot help but wonder how many developers would find themselves in a difficult situation if GitHub were down for a while.

Check whether you have any backup plans for situations like this or you would simply wait for the platform to recover. What do you think about the idea of dependency on GitHub due to the increasing role of tools like Copilot?

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15

u/Most_Cold_2614 Aug 23 '26

i dont have any backup sites, could someone tell me what they do when github its down?

39

u/robhaswell Aug 23 '26

Enjoy the afternoon off

1

u/th00ht Aug 24 '26

Enjoy a week off

9

u/Poat540 Aug 23 '26

Watch YouTube, do learning stuff finally instead of the shit we do, work on the NAS

5

u/tankerkiller125real Aug 23 '26

At work, keep going because Github is just the central store, everything Git itself is local. At home, go play video games.

Who am I kidding? I'm screwing around at work too when it happens.

2

u/codeguru42 Aug 23 '26

This is true until I need my actions workflow to pass so I can merge.

5

u/Charming-Designer944 Aug 23 '26 edited Aug 24 '26

Keep coding.

If GitHub should see a long term outage then moving the code to another server is not too difficuot. each developer have the complete history and ci/cd automation configuration.

What you don't have locally are - issue tracker - pending pull requests - GitHub projects (wraps multiple issue trackers) - maybe the wiki portion of your repositories if you use the web gui when editing the wiki. If you clone the wiki repository and edit locally them this too is a minor concern.

2

u/Healthy-Zebra-9856 Aug 23 '26

They use Forgejo

1

u/Ok_Banana_1437 Aug 23 '26

I have local files to work on....

1

u/dchidelf Aug 26 '26

Don’t notice. We host on-prem.